The current members of Chevy 6 are, left to right, Richard Crawford, Ken Murray, Ben Burford, Roe Collins and Bob Norman.Where were you the night of April 27, 1974? How about Jan. 7, 1989? Or Oct. 3, 2008?

Ben Burford can tell you where he was on those dates, plus about 2,655 others.

It’s all chronicled in “Chevy 6 – 35rpm,” a year-by-year look at the first 35 years of one of Birmingham’s most popular party bands.

“It started with me trying to get us into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame,” says Burford, front man for the oldies’ group. “I was making the book for that .¤.¤. Once I started doing that, I thought, hmmm .¤.¤. Before I knew it, it was forming a year-by-year thing.”

The jury’s still out on the Hall of Fame, but fans of Chevy 6 can get their hands on “Chevy 6 –35rpm,” which includes two CDs of music from the group, sometime within the next couple of weeks.

The 120-page hardcover, full-color book, on sale now at www.chevy6book.com, includes the history of the band with anecdotes from Burford’s extensive journals, vintage photographs and the band’s lineup through the years. The piece de resistance, though, for those who grew up in Birmingham with memories of Chevy 6, is Burford’s painstaking list of each and every one of the band’s appearances from 1974 until 2009.

He used contracts, journal entries and other sources to give the date and location of every fraternity party, debutante ball and bar date the band has had, including April 27, 1974 (Chevy 6’s first gig, at Tuscaloosa’s Woodland Forrest Country Club), Jan. 7, 1989 (one of 112 appearances at Louie Louie in Birmingham) and Oct. 3, 2008 (a reunion of the University of Alabama Law School).

It’ll be the kind of book that people like Cynthia Dooley of Alabaster will love.

She first heard Chevy 6 as a freshman at the University of Alabama. Now, the 47-year-old children’s director at Helena United Methodist Church listens to Chevy 6’s music online, downloading the¥’60s hits that the group still sings in concert.

“The music was so much fun,” says Dooley, who heard Chevy 6 a number of times in Tuscaloosa and at Louie Louie. “Even though it was older songs, you could sing along to it, and you could dance to it.”

Chevy 6 has played to thousands of people over the years, including Dooley’s oldest son, Brad, a senior at the University of Alabama. The band also played at her husband’s office Christmas party about eight years ago, she says.

In the process, Chevy 6 has become one of the most-seen bands in Birmingham’s music history. They’ve shared the bill with a number of popular state bands, including Three on a String, which is a couple of years older than Chevy 6.

“I believe we played the same bill twice, once in Tuscaloosa and once in Fort Payne,” says Jerry Ryan of Three on a String. “I identified very much with their song selection, and if not for Three On a String, I would have loved to play in a band just like Chevy 6.”

It’s those party-friendly songs, plus the freewheeling style of Burford and his bandmates, that have helped Chevy 6 maintain a following.

“That oldies, beach,¥’60s kind of thing that they do is just pure happiness,” says Rick Carter, a Birmingham music veteran whose bands have included Telluride, Rollin’ in the Hay and Frankie Velvet and the Mighty Veltones. “It’s the soundtrack of our lives, and they’re the band that has represented it for 35 years.”

Burford and then-bandmates Maurice Shannon, Kenny and O’Neal Smitherman, Brian Smith and Mike Grayson were the original band members. The lineup changed through the years, all chronicled in the new book, but since 2006, it has been Burford, Ken Murray, Roe Collins, Richard Crawford and Bob Norman.

All the while, it has been the theatrical Burford who has led the charge, entertaining audiences — at times in drag as “Brenda Burford” — with songs such as “This Diamond Ring,” “The Name Game” and “Build Me Up Buttercup.” Burford estimates he has performed that last ditty – originally sung by the Foundations – 4,176 times live.

“We sometimes sang that song three times a night,” Burford says.

They sang it hundreds of times at Louie Louie, the nightclub in Five Points South co-owned by Burford’s brother, Jim.

In the 1980s, Louie Louie was among Birmingham’s most popular nightclubs for live music, and it served as a home base for Chevy 6, the first band to take the stage there when it opened in 1982.

“Those were the salad days, as Nicolas Cage said in ‘Raising Arizona,’” Ben Burford says. “There was one week when we played for six nights and two days. I don’t know how we did that. That’s just absurd.”

Carter fondly recalls playing with Burford at the annual Toys for Tots fundraisers at Louie Louie.

“Ben’s a hoot,” Carter says. “At those parties, all of the musicians would draw names out of a hat and form their own bands. I was in a band with Benje two years in a row. He’s just nuts.”

Chevy 6 has always been a part-time job for Burford and his bandmates. Burford is partner and senior art director at DavisDenny in Birmingham, Collins sells real estate in Orange Beach, Norman is a Birmingham attorney, Crawford works in employment securities in Tuscaloosa and Murray is a farmer in Faunsdale, where he lives in a converted schoolhouse.

“It’s a vacation to be around them,” Burford says. “It’s like going off and playing golf with your friends and getting paid instead of having to pay.”

For his part, Burford, who has been married to his wife, Jean, for 32 years and has two grown children, isn’t ready to quit.

“If I start working out and lose a little weight, I think I can do it another 25 years,” the 56-year-old Burford says.

And that’s fine with Dooley, who would love to see the band in concert again.

“It brings back good memories of being in college and having fun with my friends,” she says